I’ve been meaning to get another status update written for a couple of weeks now, but today is really the first chance that I’ve had to stop for long enough to sit down and take stock of where everything stands.

As you’ve already notice if you’re here reading this, this month I set up a new blog (which promptly fell over and had to be rebuilt). I also set up a new mailing list, which is superior to the old list in nearly every way and unlike most of the alternatives I was looking at, won’t cost me hundreds of dollars per year.

If any of you happen to be looking for a mailing list solution you should consider Sendy. You pay a one-time fee for the software, load it up to the web server that hosts your website, and then it uses Amazon’s infrastructure to actually send out the emails at a cost of just $1/10,000 emails. The real test of my installation will obviously come at the end of January when I announce the official release of Disillusioned, but so far everything seems to be working very well.

If you’re not very technical, Ben (the owner of Sendy) will install Sendy for you for a fairly modest fee.

In other news, I’ve loaded most of my titles up to Google Play, so that is an option for those of you who prefer to get your books there.

In writing news, November was National Novel Writing Month and since I was due to start another book the first of November I went ahead and participated in NaNoWriMo (or NaNo-Rhino as my oldest daughter calls it) this year.

Knowing that I was posting daily word counts where other people could see them was an incredible motivator and I finished Ben, Jasmin and Geoffrey’s book in record (for me at least) time. The rough draft weighed in at 105k words and I typed the last word on the 19th. Since I don’t write on Sundays that meant I completed it in just 16 working days for an average production of 6,500 words per day, which is the highest sustained writing production since last December when I was desperately trying to get Forsaken finished up before Christmas.

As you can probably tell, I’m pretty excited about how well this latest book came together. The extra 10 days or so of time in November was a big part of why I was able to take some time away from editing so that I could get the new website and mailing list up, so a banner production month like that couldn’t have come at a better time.

The other thing that I began experimenting with on this last book was splitting my writing up into 25-minute sessions and tracking my progress on a session by session basis. I’ve always tracked my daily production, but it did seem to make a difference to monitor my writing at a more granular level.

It probably sounds like I’m sharing all of this to brag (maybe a little, but I know there are lots of people out there that blow my production numbers out of the water), but the primary reason for sharing it is that it raises the possibility of more than 6 books per year. It’s still not set in stone, but the possibility is there. The other reason for sharing this particular accomplishment is that I know some of my readers have aspirations of finishing books of their own, and I thought it might be helpful for that crowd to see some of the things that are helping me get more work done in less time.

Changing gears again, Disillusioned (Dark Reflections 1) will go live on January 23rd and I think it is going to be a real treat for everyone. Some things are the same as Broken and Torn in the Dark Reflections timeline, but there are a lot of things that are incredibly different and all of those differences stem from one thing, one incredibly important difference that has changed the course of Alec and Adri’s world in profound ways.

Part of me wishes that I could just come right out and tell you all exactly what that difference is, but that would ruin half of the fun that I have in store for the series. There are still a lot of layers that I need to peel back before all is said and done.

I hope to be able to do a cover reveal post for Disillusioned a couple of weeks before the release date.

March 17th (don’t worry this is all listed on my New Release Schedule Page) will see the release of Hunted (the second Dark Reflections novel). Disillusioned was primarily about the differences in Alec’s life, Hunted is all about Adri.

I can usually tell how good of a job I’ve done on a given book based on my wife Katie’s response after she reads it. When I told Katie that Adri was going to get her own Dark Reflections book there wasn’t much excitement on Katie’s part, I think because she was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to keep a full-length novel about a ‘normal’ human exciting. I’m happy to say that the final product vastly exceeded Katie’s expectations.

She basically read it straight through, stopping only grudgingly to eat dinner and go to bed for the night. It’s been a while since one of my books grabbed Katie out of the gate like that and refused to let her go, so I think I’ve managed something extra special with this one! I can’t wait to see what all of you think of Hunted.

I’ll be releasing another Reflections book on May 29th, and this one will advance Ben and Jasmin’s storyline at the same time that it introduces Geoffrey to some of our favorite shape shifters. I’ll be dropping some pretty key hints in this book as to some of the things that are still in store for the series.

The next release (August 8th) will be the third Dark Reflections novel. This is the book that I just finished, so the jury is still out on it (I need to go back through it again before I give it to Katie to read) but there are some pretty important things that take place in this one as well. I made some good progress on strengthening one of the key relationships in the Dark Reflections books. That relationship is actually one of the main reasons that I initially set out to write the Dark Reflections series, so I’m incredibly excited to see it start to come together.

I also drop a major hint at the end of this most recent novel, a hint that reveals one of the layers of intrigue that I’ve been wanting to tell all of you about for more months than I care to think about.

I think that my book ‘pipeline’ is as strong as it has ever been and I’m looking forward to where the series goes from here.

I still have a major plot hurdle to work my way around, but I think that my next book will be Isaac’s story, after which I’ll either do the fourth Dark Reflections novel or I’ll write Jess’ story and peel back the curtain that has been hiding Wyatt’s origins.

Simultaneous to all of that, I’m working out what is going on with Alec, Adri and Rachel. Needless to say that I’m starting to worry that it’s all going to get hopelessly snarled in my head, but so far so good 🙂

I hope that you all are able to spend next week surrounded with friends and family and that you have a merry Christmas, or whatever the equivalent holiday is for you.

–Dean